Rockingham woman lynched for 'disreputable character': history

Inflammatory headline, Buffalo Evening News, Sept. 30, 1897 reads, '"Peb" Falls, the Worst White Woman in the Virginia Mountains' in an account of her unsolved lynching. Falls had already been tarred and feathered for associating "with the low negroes" before being killed.(Photo: Provided.)

Her name was Peb Falls, a white woman from Cowan’s Depot about 10 miles north of Harrisonburg. On September 29, 1897, her rain-soaked, partially decomposed body was found by hunters hanging by her neck from the limb of a Sycamore tree in the uninhabited foothills of the Massanuttens, just a few miles north of Keezletown.

The theory that emerged was that she had been lynched by blacks after supposedly stealing money from one of them. If true, it is the only black on white lynching in Virginia history.

But the true identity of her killers is mired in the murkiness of history.

From the end of the civil war into the mid-20th century, mob violence and lynching was used to control racial order and uphold white supremacy, especially in southern states. African-American men, women, and children – sometimes accused of crimes and sometimes not – were tortured, hung, shot and even set on fire, occasionally in front of cheering crowds.

In some cases, however, whites were also subjected to this domestic terrorism, and Peb Falls’ story paints a unique picture of a white woman accused of no crime, but who merely journeyed outside the rigidly-defined boundaries of 1890s moral, social and racial orders.

In most situations, women who did not conform to these social constraints were reprimanded, ostracized or even jailed by the white male hierarchy. With Peb, however, the social order went a grisly step further and actually murdered her for “disreputable character.”

Peb was heartlessly described as “the worst white woman in the Virginia Mountains” and “absolutely without moral character” by the Allentown (Pennsylvania) Morning Call newspaper, among others. These and other even more callous descriptions suggest to modern-day readers a woman who was most likely mentally ill or substance-abusing, and unjustly labeled as “hideously depraved from her early youth” due to her propensity for socializing at first with “low-class, abusive white men.”

Then, the press reported “She fell still lower and associated with the low negroes.”
Months prior to her lynching, her fraternizing with these “low class” black men was so repulsive to the local white citizenry that they decided to teach her a lesson.

“They could not kill her, as she was a white woman,” stated the anonymous Morning Call journalist, “and it was not much use beating her.” So after ignoring a warning from some white men to “make her evil life less conspicuous,” one day (with law enforcement conspicuously absent) she was pulled from a shack, stripped naked in the street of Cowans and held tightly by several men.

The paper reported “As she screamed, [they] applied burning hot tar to her body from head to heels, then showered small feathers all over her and turned her adrift naked, save for the tar and feathers.”

The men may have been satisfied with their degrading and traumatic act but it did nothing to reform Peb, who reportedly went on receiving “shelter, food and moonshine whiskey” from black men.

Her behavior became even more erratic as she descended further into hopeless alcoholism, and at one point she was forced out of town, having to live “like a wild animal” in the woods surrounding Cowans.

After the discovery of Peb’s hanged body it was immediately rumored she had been lynched by the blacks she lived with, under some bogus theory that she stole their savings. “Some of her negro friends, inspired by the lynching example of the whites, may have decided it was their duty to go the tar and feathering whites one better, and murder the woman outright,” speculated the Morning Call reporter.

Another writer in the Stanford (Kentucky) Journal reported (probably more realistically) that “the negroes and the respectable whites believe that the woman was killed by the same set of men who tarred and feathered her,” who then blamed the blacks to deflect attention from themselves.

But in defiance of typical mob behavior, no one allegedly bragged or admitted participating in the lynching of Peb Falls. “Ordinarily the participants in a lynching bee talk freely enough,” the Morning Call reported. “They are the local heroes of the hour and do not take much pains to conceal their identity. But in this case it is different.”

Rumblings of more lynchings and an anticipated race war emanated from Rockingham as Sheriff’s deputies and detectives descended on the area. “Citizens there will not wait for the law, but will as soon as the perpetrators of this outrage are discovered, lynch those immediately concerned,” warned a duplicitous reporter with the Buffalo (New York) Evening News, who seemed intent on starting that race war himself. “If the negroes who strung her up are found they will be given the same punishment by whites.”

The lynching was rightly condemned across the commonwealth although barely mentioned in the Virginia press. Governor Charles O’Ferrell, a reputed white supremacist but strong opponent of mob violence, would not accept the woman’s “wickedness” as an excuse for her murder. He quickly declared that he would severely punish the murderers if they were found, white or black, after the Stanford Journal concluded that “Virginians must be deteriorating when they get to lynching women.”

Like most lynchings, however, there are sadly no records of anyone caught or prosecuted for the lynching of Peb Falls.